A new open-source service created by the OPERANDO project aims to protect user privacy online, increasing the power users have over the data they transfer to online service providers.
The service is called ‘PlusPrivacy’ and offers a unified social networks privacy dashboard where the user can manage their privacy settings for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others.
There’s also a ‘single-click privacy’ that automatically sets all accounts to the most ‘privacy friendly values’.
‘Privacy-for-Benefit’ is still being developed but the plan is to create new business models which will allow users to partially trade their private data for ‘economic benefits’ — which could be the first step towards personal data as currency.
Zeev Pritzker from Arteevo Technologies Ltd, one of the partners in the OPERANDO project consortium, said: “Typically this would be a discount given by a service/product provider.
“PlusPrivacy will then get a small fee for brokering the deal that will be paid by the product/service provider.”
According to Pritzker, the data traded with service providers via PlusPrivacy would be the same as data currently ‘given away’ every time a user logs in to services such as Facebook, Twitter or Google.
Pritzker added: “While most users are not aware of it, [logging in with social media accounts] gives a third party access to their social network data. PlusPrivacy will prevent this — reminding the user to log in with email and password instead — while giving the user the option to log in with, say, Facebook and receive an economic benefit in exchange.”
Pritzker emphasised that the exchange would only happen if people explicitly opt in.
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Projeler
Most of the environmental impacts of lawn area establishment and maintenance result from the properties and production of soil substrate, according to a lifecycle assessment (LCA) case study. In our living environment, green lawns are also sources of environmental impacts, especially when nicely managed. One might think that machinery would be the most important source of greenhouse gasses, but, on the other hand, lawns would be good targets for the circulation of nutrients in organic material as an alternative to peat. These aspects were the background of our approach.
In the LCA case study, we analysed the environmental impacts of the establishment and maintenance of lawns, including the production and use of various soil substrates. Many materials can be used in the production of substrates for various landscaping purposes. Anyway, substrate material must be homogeneous, safe and applicable for the roots of the plant to adhere and grow. The substrate must not contain harmful compounds, products or organisms that endanger the health of lawn plants and must be safe to manage and use. We focused on comparing substrates with different peat and compost contents mixed with mineral soil in the substrate. The study included different composting materials (e.g. sludge and municipal biowaste) and composting methods (e.g. use of woodchips or peat as adhesive material). Lifecycle assessment methodology and ISO standards 14040 and 14044 were used in environmental impact assessments. Primary environmental impact categories, which we assessed, were climate change and aquatic eutrophication. We regarded the lifetime of lawn to be 20 years, and fertilisation of the establishment phase to endure for the first ten years. Carbon dioxide from peat degradation is regarded as fossil, and that from organic compost and woodchips as biogenic.
A 20 cm thick substrate layer, which means two thousand tonnes of substrates per hectare of lawn area, were assumed to be needed when establishing a new lawn field. This is a large amount of material to be managed and moved. Climate impact of the lifecycle of lawn areas using different pilot substrates varied between 25 and 51kg CO2-eq/m2 lawn (in the lifetime of 20 years).
Degradation of peat appeared to be the most significant factor of the influence of climate; the contribution of peat degradation was up to 80% of the total carbon footprint when amount of peat in the substrate was 44 kg/m2 lawn area.
The percentage of compost to emissions was 38% in substrate, which contained 55 mass-% compost. Thus, the most effective means of reducing the impact of landscaping on climate is to replace peat with circulated organic material as compost.
Nitrous oxide and methane emissions were related to the use of compost. There is the next challenge to develop treatment of compost to avoid these emissions.
The significance of fuel consumption by machinery in lawn establishment and mowing was low. The high contents of N and P in compost-based substrates may lead in wet situations to nutrient emissions into water systems, which can have significant local impact. Local conditions must be considered when choosing raw materials for substrate. Lawn mowing, even with conventional machinery, does not have a significant climate change impact on the entire lifecycle of landscaping. New solar panel-operated lawn mowers would minimise this impact.
We developed guidelines for comparing conventional and highly recycled material content lawns at various intensity levels and a calculation tool to optimise landscaping from an ecological perspective. Our developed LCA calculation tool helps to optimise soils substrate contents in order to manage the environmental impacts. Various organic materials in substrates can be compared by the tool on a case-by-case basis.
This study was carried out in LIFE09ENV FI 00570 LCA IN LANDSCAPING project that was supported by the EU LIFE Programme.
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An international research team has developed inks made of graphene-like materials for inkjet printing.
New black phosphorous inks are compatible with conventional inkjet printing techniques for optoelectronics and photonics.
Professor Zhipei Sun at Aalto University in Finland said: “Our inkjet printing demonstration makes possible for the first time the scalable mass fabrication of black phosphorous-based photonic and optoelectronic devices with long-term stability necessary for a wide range of industrial applications.”
Scientists optimised the chemical composition to achieve a stable ink through the balance of complex and competing fluidic effects.
The researchers’ work demonstrated the benefits of their novel technique by inkjet printing devices that take advantage of the properties of black phosphorous.
Its semiconducting bandgap can be readily varied by engineering the number of atomic layers and can cover the visible and near-infrared region of the electromagnetic spectrum.
The researchers also demonstrated printed black phosphorous-based nonlinear optical devices that can be inserted into lasers to act as ultra-quick optical shutters, converting a continuous beam of laser radiation into a repetitive series of short bursts of light suited for industrial and medical applications, such as machining, imaging and sensing.
In the study, black phosphorous was also able to act as an efficient and responsive detector of light.
The new ink was developed by an interdisciplinary team of international researchers at Aalto University, University of Cambridge (UK), Imperial College London (UK) and Beihang University (China).
The research was supported by the Academy of Finland, Tekes – the Finnish Funding Agency for Innovation, Nokia Foundation and the European Commission.
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A European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST)-funded network of researchers is developing innovative solutions to strengthen Europe’s communication systems.
The solutions also aim to increase the systems resilience to terrorist attacks, natural disasters and hardware or software failures.
Academics and industry experts in collaboration with governmental bodies are addressing the risks of network failure. They aim to introduce innovative methods to defend existing and future communication networks against disruptions, as well as supply operators and providers with recommendations on how to design and update networks.
The research is being co-ordinated through the COST Action ‘Resilient Communication Services Protecting End-user Applications from Disaster-based Failures’ (RECODIS).
The aim is to establish new techniques for risk management, anomaly detection and remediation mechanisms across a variety of applications including utility networks and cloud-based systems.
RECODIS vice chair Professor David Hutchison, said: “RECODIS will further advance the understanding and development of resilience techniques that can be built into future communication networks and the systems and applications that they so critically serve.
“By anticipating, planning, and coping with disasters, resilient systems can help make society more secure and much safer.”
“COST funding provides for people-networking across the Action, including plenary meetings a few times each year, but also – this is very important – for the exchange of researchers between institutions and organisations in short-term scientific missions.”
RECODIS builds on EU projects such as SECCRIT, SPARKS, and HyRiM.
Resilience principles and mechanisms that underlie this work were previously investigated in the EU ResumeNet project.
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MedAware, a provider of algorithm-rich solutions for the detection and elimination of prescription errors, has announced that the company has raised $8m (~€6.8m) in ‘Series A’ funding.
Investors participating in the round included BD (Becton, Dickinson and Company), Gefen Capital, OurCrowd and Yingcheng City Fubon Technology Co.
In addition, MedAware has received grants from Israel’s Innovation Authority and the BIRD Foundation, as well as from the European Commission as part of its Horizon 2020 programme, bringing the company’s total funding raised to date to $12m.
The funding will be used to advance the company’s approach to identifying the most consequential medication mistakes, thus improving patient safety and saving lives.
MedAware will leverage its patented software to perform a real-time evaluation of a prescribed drug against a specific and up-to-date patient profile. The company’s advanced machine-learning algorithms mine data to detect outliers in prescription behaviour that could potentially be fatal and immediately flag them as life threatening.
Jon Medved, CEO of OurCrowd, said: “OurCrowd is proud to be investing again in MedAware, a company whose product is changing the way that medicine is prescribed.
“The ability to ensure that prescriptions will heal rather than harm by utilising machine learning and big data analysis, is about as good as it gets in impact investing. It gives me goosebumps to realise that by investing in this revolutionary company we will indeed save lives.”
MedAware intends to use the Series A funding to develop additional machine learning-enabled decision support solutions, as well as making ongoing product enhancements to cover more catastrophic types of errors.
Gidi Stein, CEO of MedAware, said: “MedAware was purpose built around our commitment to patient safety.
“Every catastrophic error we identify is a patient saved. Through this round of Series A funding we will be able to build on the successes we’ve achieved to date and scale our approach to protect physicians and their patients all over the world.”
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Accomable, the ‘Airbnb for disabled people’, is working with EU-funded project EuTravel to shape the future of accessible travel and enable those with a mobility issue to book ‘door-to-door’ transport across the EU.
Working with major global distribution system (GDS) providers and transport companies, EuTravel will tap into existing mainstream IT travel reservation systems and sources of travel data to enable people to find and book complete door-to-door transport routes via multiple modes of transport, including air, rail, bus and ferry, to and from all countries within the EU, via a single platform.
Managed by Inlecom, a management consultancy firm, EuTravel has collaborated with Accomable, the global platform for finding adapted hotels and vacation rentals for disabled and elderly people, to participate in the project pilot and identify the challenges faced by less mobile travellers, and to ensure accessible transport options are easy to find and book as part of the new system.
Inlecom’s project support director, Yash Chadha, said: “Accessibility is at the heart of the EuTravel project. Our technology will make it easy for citizens of the EU and international visitors to travel across the single market, and to plan journeys which suit their individual needs. Key to this is ensuring the service is open to everyone, including disabled users and anyone with a mobility issue, which is why we’re thrilled to have Accomable onboard as consultants on accessibility.”
Accomable’s CEO and co-founder, Srin Madipalli, said: “Our mission has always been to enable anyone to go anywhere, so we are delighted to be working with EuTravel project to ensure disabled people worldwide can research and book accessible transport across the EU with ease.
“Our disabled customers are extremely aware of how difficult it is to plan accessible transport routes when travelling at home and abroad, as online information is often incorrect or out of date. Our role will be to consult EuTravel project towards delivering a solution that contains full accessibility information you can trust.”
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Dr Maria Asplund, junior professor Dr Lena Henningsen, and Professor Dr Lars Pastewka of the University of Freiburg, Germany, have been chosen to receive funding from the European Research Council (ERC).
The ERC has presented the researchers with a starting grant of just under €4.5m for new projects.
Asplund, of the Department of Microsystems Engineering (IMTEK), is receiving almost €1.5m for the project ‘SPEEDER’.
Electrical fields can control how cells move at the edges of a wound, and thus influence how well skin injuries heal. However, there has not been a material suitable for use to stimulate the cells. The SPEEDER project aims to develop a supercapacitive polymer that can store and release a particularly high amount of energy, enabling electrical fields to be maintained over an extended period of time. The researchers are planning to incorporate the material as active components in an electronic dressing. This could be used in severe cases to speed up the healing process and prevent the wound becoming chronic.
Henningsen, of the Institute of Chinese Studies, is also receiving a grant of almost €1.5m for her project ‘The Politics of Reading in the People’s Republic of China (READCHINA)’.
READCHINA will use the perspective of reading practices to investigate the intellectual, literary and societal transformation that has taken place in China since the 1940s.
Pastewka of the Department of Microsystems Engineering (IMTEK) is also receiving an ERC grant of almost €1.5m for his project ‘Emergence of Surface Roughness in Shaping, Finishing and Wear Processes (ShapingRoughness)’.
Detailed knowledge of why surfaces are rough is presently lacking. Pastewka will use computer simulations to study microscopic processes during mechanical deformation to discover the mechanisms underlying formation of roughness and predict specific topographies of machined surfaces.
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A new three-year research project has been launched to address safety and efficiency in Arctic ship operations.
SEDNA will develop a novel risk-based approach to Arctic navigation, ship design and maritime operations.
The project will develop the ‘Safe Arctic Bridge’, a human-centred operational environment for ice-going vessels. Its design and layout will focus on the navigational requirements of the Arctic, namely ice, weather and a lack of chart data.
The Safe Arctic Bridge will use augmented reality to improve situational awareness and to support the crew in their decision making. It will be developed and tested in a virtual bridge prototyping system.
SEDNA will develop anti-icing solutions for vessels’ superstructures. The build-up of ice on a ship can pose a serious risk to safety, as it affects stability and may render important equipment unusable. To prevent this, SEDNA will mimic the water-repellent properties of penguins’ feathers with a combination of a special surface texture and an oil-based coating. In addition, energy-efficient electro-thermal systems will be used.
It will also develop a risk-based design framework for ship safety, including the definition of hazard scenarios, their likelihood and their expected consequences.
In particular, this will take into account ice loads and their effects on ships.
This aspect of the project will be based on the work of the LRF Centre of Excellence for Arctic Shipping and Operations and is expected to contribute to future development of the International Maritime Organization’s Polar Code.
The project is led by BMT Group Ltd (UK) and brings together 13 partners from six different countries.
The partners are University College London (UK), Chalmers University of Technology (Sweden), Atkitektur – og designhøgskolen i Oslo (Norway), University of Southampton (UK), MET Office (UK), Cork Institute of Technology (Ireland), Aalto University (Finland), Lloyd’s Register EMEA (UK), Aker Arctic Technology Inc. (Finland), Stena Rederi AB (Sweden), Dalian University of Technology (China) and Harbin Engineering University (China).
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Scientists at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) have developed a new method to efficiently measure electron transfer in dye-sensitised transition-metal oxide photovoltaics.
Sensitised solar cells consisting of a molecular or solid-state sensitiser that serves to collect light and inject an electron into a substrate that favours their migration are among the most studied photovoltaic systems.
Despite its importance in determining the potential of a photovoltaic device, current methods for monitoring the interfacial electron transfer remain ambiguous.
Using deep-ultraviolet continuum pulses, EPFL scientists have developed a substrate-specific method to detect electron transfer.
The work was carried out by the lab of Majed Chergui at EPFL, which specialises in ultrafast spectroscopy.
The group focused on two types of dye-sensitised solar conversion systems: one based on titanium dioxide, the other on zinc-oxide nanoparticles, both of which belong to the category of transition-metal oxide (TMO) substrates.
These TMOs are characterised by specific absorption bands, which are fingerprints of the system and are due to neutral electron-hole pairs, called an exciton.
The EPFL team aimed to overcome the limitations of current methods of measuring electron transfer, which all use light in the visible-to-terahertz frequencies. However, this approach is sensitive to carriers that remain free in the TMO substrate. They are therefore unspecific to the type of substrate and cannot be extended to the new generation of solid-state-sensitised solar cells.
Instead, the researchers at EPFL used deep-ultraviolet continuum pulses to probe the TMO substrates in the region of their excitonic transitions and detect electron transfer, via their response.
This opens a route to the study of solid-state sensitised cells, as there is hope that the response of the substrate will be distinguished from that of the sensitiser.
The work is published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and the study was funded under the Horizon 2020 programme and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).
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An Italian provincial governor has defended the killing of a rare female brown bear in the Alps, stating it was a threat to humans.
The bear, called Kj2, was shot dead by foresters on 12 August, after it seriously mauled an elderly man walking his dog last month.
Trentino governor Ugo Rossi said the killing would not stop a project to reintroduce bears to the region, but their habitat must be restricted.
Around 50 bears live in the province.
Conservation groups have protested over the shooting and demanded better management of the EU-funded bear project, called Life Ursus.
Rossi said the shooting was “an absolute necessity” due to the risk to people at a peak period for tourism.
“Anywhere in the world, when the danger rises above a certain level, the animal has to be killed to ensure people’s safety,” he said.
Brown bears from Slovenia started to be reintroduced to Trentino in 1999, a region where they had been exterminated by hunters.
Rossi said Life Ursus would continue, but the initial plan to allow the bears to roam widely would have to be revised.
The World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) Italy said ‘bears must not pay the price for human errors’ – and indicated that too many dogs had been let off the lead in the Alpine forests where the bears were roaming.
The organisation urged the authorities to ‘work to eliminate the causes of such unpleasant episodes’.
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